Monthly Archives: October 2016

When we first decided to come to Korea we worked out that we could save in one year in Korea more than we could earn in total in one year in South Africa:

At the time we knew nothing about Early Retirement or the realistic possibility of Financial Independence but we did know that we wanted to save for a house deposit. And the magic number of what we thought we could save in Korea was an absolute dream. And I mean dream: Continue reading →

Whaaaaaaaat?! We have OFFICIALLY been doing Our Brat Experiment for SIX MONTHS?! Wow. I can’t actually believe that we have done it for so long. When we first started this journey I was desperately hoping that the blog would help us stay accountable and keep us on track… but I never dared to hope that we would stick at it for an entire SIX MONTHS. And with no sign of stopping either 🙂 Yay 🙂

School lunch out. It was very fancy because we used copper utensils (traditionally used by Korean royal families because it apparently helps prevent poisoning).

I think that we did really well this week. We worked very hard at spending as little as possible and, given that both of us still have (a LITTLE!) money in our bank accounts, it looks like it has worked 🙂 Today is payday so we are thrilled that we have survived 🙂

Last week went ok I think… not fantastically but fine. We had our friends from Daegu come and visit us, which was great 🙂 We showed them around our town (they were suitably impressed!), indulged in some girl time while shopping for makeup (a real treat given that I have no girlfriends in our town), ate fantastic food and just generally chatted and caught up 🙂 Happy, happy people all around 🙂

We worked really hard this week to only spend what was absolutely necessary… which you will see we didn’t do very well at. Which sucks because we felt like we were really sacrificing! Continue reading →

This was a long week because of the month end, which meant that we had two weekends in it. And we went away both weekends (to Seoul the first weekend and Gwangju the second weekend) so my guess is that we spent quite a bit….

To new readers of The Brat Experiment: Husband and I track every single won that we spend on a fantastic app called Money Lover. The app is synched to both of our phones and means that it’s very easy to see where all of our money goes (which is not always pleasant!). I then report on our weekly spending here and write up a summary of our spending for each month. You can check out other weekly spends and the monthly summaries in The Numbers section.